Tag: maquette

Kevin Cane stood on the margin of the car park where the painted lines gave way to a paved road between tourist shops. The asphalt looked like it had been poured thin and hot over a poorly groomed dirt road then hardened in place. Its fresh black with grey aggregate matched his goatee and moustache. The vespers sun blah blah.

[He is in San Diego attending the marriage of his friend Colin Abes. This is Colin’s second marriage; the bride is the same age as the bride at the first—which Kevin also attended.

At the first wedding fifteen or so years ago, Kevin had an affinity for the couple. Even though he was single, even though he’d been right in the middle of his first stint in the Navy, the event felt like a beginning for him. This obvious affair be contrast feels like an end.

Kevin turned forty recently, that gives him the right to say he feels old and wise even though he’s neither.]

At a glance Narkkid didn’t look ex-military. Her body was small and lithe; her black hair was long and straight; and her brown eyes were soft and light. But when she spoke, when she asked her mechanics to prep a flit or when she told a customer their ride wouldn’t be ready for another week, then the evidence of her past life surfaced like a dead body in a river. Listeners knew that she’d seen and done things they could only imagine. They knew she had told people to “Go there; do that.” knowing full well they’d die in that going and doing. And that she’d done it more than once.

Though she had been very good at what she’d done, she never liked it much. She’d have rather been a musician or a painter creating melodies or landscapes with her hands; being a flit mechanic was as close as she’d gotten in the ten years since she’d retired.

Knowing she wouldn’t utter the next number in her countdown, she went to her office and set the door near closed.

I looked for a better source of this photo but didn’t find one before I started running out of time to write.

Steven Tattersall lived in New Zealand and that gave him a familiar but exotic mystique. It also made him funny—to Karen at least. And for some reason she held the impression he was or had been a sailor, but he never had. This is his home.

Steve’s place is unusual, and part of the problem describing it is that you want to stop there and just say, “Well, you’d have to see it.” But all the pieces of Steve’s treehouse—because that’s where you go after you’ve already said ‘unusual’—are completely normal. They just aren’t combined in an expected way. Imagine a perfectly usual cabin with a hipped roof and a Queen Anne style dormer above the classically centered front door. Then float that cabin two stories above the shoreline of a good-sized pond, build in the first and second stories with tin and cedar and plywood to hold your perfectly usual cabin up, sprout an extra-tall extra bedroom out of the top of your usual cabin, and finally add a bell tower to the top of that. As time permits, cobble on some walkways and lean-outs and fashion a multi-tiered redwood party deck to hover out over the pond. Just call the whiskey barrels and teak love-seat homey embellishments.